BIOGRAPHY OF CAMILLA LIFTS LID ON AFFAIR WITH CHARLES

BIOGRAPHY OF CAMILLA LIFTS LID ON AFFAIR WITH CHARLES



An explosive biography of Camilla — to mark her 70th birthday next month — lifts the lid on her affair with Prince Charles.

On Saturday in the Mail, royal author Penny Junor, who talked to Camilla's friends and family, revealed how Charles wept the night before he married Diana.

Today, she tells how the marriage drove him to the brink of a breakdown...

Camilla Parker Bowles approved, and so did her husband Andrew. The 19- year-old girl who was dating the Prince of Wales struck them both as very sweet and funny.

Whenever he brought Lady Diana Spencer to their home — Bolehyde in the village of Allington, Wiltshire — she helped around the house and was noticeably good with their children.



Camilla definitely liked her; and at first, Diana liked Camilla and appreciated her friendship — a friendship that was genuine.

Of all Charles's friends, only three raised question marks about his happy-go-lucky and unaffected new girlfriend, and they weren't thanked for their concerns.

Nicholas Soames, later to become a Tory MP, thought the pair had too little in common and was worried about the intellectual gap between them. Norton Romsey, the grandson of Earl Mountbatten, agreed.

His wife, Penny Romsey, was also worried that Diana was more in love with the concept than the man. After all, she'd once been heard to say: 'If I am lucky enough to be the Princess of Wales...'

It was as if Diana were auditioning for a part, rather than truly understanding what she'd be taking on. And she seemed to enjoy being photographed all the time, while protesting at the intrusiveness of the Press.



But what made Soames and the Romseys particularly suspicious was the way she'd gone after Charles with single-minded purpose. She'd set her sights on him, flirting and flattering and bending over backwards to be everything that he wanted her to be.

Norton had spoken to the Prince several times about his reservations, on each occasion more bluntly. But each time, he'd had his head bitten off.

The Queen offered no opinion, though the Queen Mother was enthusiastic. She liked Diana, and was pleased that she was the granddaughter of her old friend Ruth, Lady Fermoy.

As for Lady Fermoy herself, she knew very well that her granddaughter was more complicated than she seemed, and there's no question that she should have alerted Charles. But she was socially ambitious for her family, so she said nothing.

Years later, in 1993 — a month before she died — Lady Fermoy apologised to both the Queen and Charles for failing to warn them. She'd known, she admitted, that Diana had been 'a dishonest and difficult girl'. Whether this would have made a difference is open to question — because the opinion Charles trusted most when it came to choosing his bride was that of Camilla, his best friend and lover.



But, still, he was anxious. As he told a friend at the time: 'It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me, but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.'

He liked Diana, but he'd started seeing her only six months before and they scarcely knew each other. On the other hand, she seemed so perfect in so many ways that he couldn't risk losing her.

He'd always believed that love could grow out of friendship; what really mattered was that his bride should know what she was taking on. And with all her family links to the Royal Family, surely — at least in theory — Diana had to be the right woman.

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'Immature and naïve, Diana lived in a fantasy world of Barbara Cartland novels'

What Charles had yet to discover was that she was very badly educated, naïve and — by her own admission — immature. She lived in a romantic fantasy world of women's magazines and Barbara Cartland novels, which could not have been more divorced from reality.

She'd never been in love before, either. If she had, she would have known that their courtship, which involved minimal touching and was constantly conducted in the presence of Charles's friends, was not the way most people build a relationship.



As soon as her engagement to Charles was made public, Diana moved into Clarence House to stay with the Queen Mother for a